madness, alternately wrung her heart, until
at last her soul seemed appalled at the crime she contemplated.
Starting forward, she pursued the innocent creatures, while the audience
involuntarily closed their eyes and recoiled before the harrowing
spectacle, which almost elicited a stifled cry of horror. But her fine
genius invested the character with that classic dignity and beauty
which, as in the Niobe group, veils the excess of human agony in the
drapery of ideal art."

Chorley, whose warmth of admiration is always tempered by accurate
art-knowledge and the keenest insight, recurs in later years to
Pas-ta's _Medea_ in these eloquent words: "The air of quiet concentrated
vengeance, seeming to fill every fiber of her frame--as though deadly
poison were flowing through her veins--with which she stood alone
wrapped in her scarlet mantle, as the bridal procession of _Jason_ and
_Creusa_ swept by, is never to be forgotten. It must have been hard
for those on the stage with her to pass that draped statue with folded
arms--that countenance lit up with awful fire, but as still as death and
inexorable as doom. Where again has ever been seen an exhibition of art
grander than her _Medea's_ struggle with herself ere she consents to
murder her children?--than her hiding the dagger with its fell purpose
in her bosom under the strings of her distracted hair?--than of her
steps to and fro as of one drunken with frenzy--torn with the agonies
of natural pity, yet still resolved on her awful triumph? These memories
are so many possessions to those who have seen them so long as reason
shall last; and their reality is all the more assured to me because I
have not yet fallen into the old man's habit of denying or doubting
new sensations." The Paris public, it need not be said, even more
susceptible to the charm of great acting than that of great singing,
were in a frenzy of admiration over this wonderful new picture added to
the portrait-gallery of art. In this performance Pasta had the advantage
of absorbing the whole interest of the opera; in her other great
Parisian successes she was obliged to share the admiration of the public
with the tenor Garcia (Malibran's father), the barytone Bordogni, and
Levasseur the basso, next to Lablache the greatest of his artistic kind.

A story is told of a distinguished critic that he persuaded himself
that, with such power of portraying _Medea's_ emotions, Pasta must
possess Medea's features. Having